The art of being different in Miss Saigon: Under colonialism, there is one acceptable way to be a woman of color - to die tragically

Miss Saigon was one of the few musicals I got the (dis)pleasure of watching live. I didn’t cry a single tear. I was too busy being furious. Highly acclaimed as it is in West End and Broadway, Miss Saigon reeks of colonialism and white savior complex, a white narrative from and for white colonialism. Even though Kim and Chris are both set up to be different from the rest of the characters, their Otherness cannot be more opposing yet are strikingly similar. Kim was othered not only from the other Asian characters – shone by the light of purity, innocence, and femininity – but also from the audience whose sympathy she was supposed to garner. Chris was othered from the characters – as one of the only white men in the show – but he was one and the same with the people who are watching him.

Kim is a virtuous character, but at the same time, she is a fallen woman. Her narrative ties neatly into the virgin–Madonna-whore complex, a complex born from the misogynistic idea that women can either be respected, tender, and completely non-sexual (the virgin and the Madonna) or be tainted and depraved by their own sexuality. As the beginning of the show, Kim was a young, innocent seventeen years old girl. She was then pushed into prostitution and consequentially was ruined. Her struggle, on the surface level, was the struggle to remain virtuous – as she transitioned from a virgin archetype to a Madonna/mother archetype while facing her trauma of being a prostitute, being “ruined” and depraved. Ultimately, her death was the resolution to these seemingly warring forces: to keep her virtue as a mother, she had to not be the “fallen” woman; and the only way to do that was to stop being alive at all. The Western audience can be enraged at this misogynistic narrative. They can sympathize with her tragedy as a woman in a world that was keen on punishing women for things outside of their control. However, the audience cannot see the true insidiousness of her story without relation to her race. Kim was not just a woman, she was an Asian woman among other Asian characters. She wasn’t written to represent her people, however. She was written to represent how the Western world see her people: greedy, scheming brutes without virtues or pride who ultimately pushed a woman like Kim to ruin.

Since the beginning of her story, Kim had been a victim. A victim of war, as she had no family, no home: she was all alone in a big city. She had so little agency or knowledge of the city life that she could only look up to the sky fearfully during an attack, unable to protect herself. Until a man – because women were always supposed to be “saved” by men – gave her a hand to pull her up and brought her into his world. That man, the Engineer, was not there to save her. He was there to ruin her. In fact, all the Asian men who had a significant role in her story – namely the Engineer and her betrothed Thuy – were in the story to oppose and hurt her. She ran from Thuy to only fall into another insidious trap that led to her complete ruin. Throughout the show, Kim was constantly pushed around – physically – by both the Engineer and Thuy. Kim, a woman – a young girl – was helpless under the thumbs of the (Asian) men in her life. Even her son (a son, and not a daughter) was a tool to make her life more miserable. The Engineer used her son’s future to manipulate her into selling her body again, and Thuy was willing to kill the child in cold blood. It was one of the only moments we saw Kim stood taller than a man. But she stood for her son, not for herself. Kim’s story perpetuated the stereotype that Asian women are most submissive and cannot stand up for themselves, while Asian men exploit these characteristics. Kim’s racial and gender identity might not be that obvious among other Asian characters, but against a Western audience, it showed more than clearly what the West thinks about Vietnam and the East.

Furthermore, there was also a contrast between Kim and the other Asian women in the story. Kim was the example of the “not like other girls” trope, but instead of only being misogynistic, this time this trope was also racist. Kim was pure and virtuous, and she was put against a backdrop of women who were not. For the majority of the show, Kim wore white – at first a cheongsam (which is a Chinese dress, showing the lack of research or respect for Vietnamese culture and Asian culture in general by the production team) and then her white wedding áo dài (which is not the color for wedding but for funerals or students, but I again doubt that the production team were aware of that). In her first night as a bargirl, Kim had her pants taken away, yet her modest top and shy demeanor – a contrast to the other girls who strutted on stage in their underwear – revealed that she hadn’t fallen into ruin yet. Her innocence was even more apparent in her duet with Gigi in “The movie in my mind” as they were put into comparison. Kim in her modest white clothes and traditional hairstyles and Gigi with her black lingerie and risqué appearance were in stark contrast. Even the lyrics they sung showed how different they were from each other. Gigi wished for an escape and materialistic wealth. Her wants were practical and monetary. Kim, innocent dreamer she was, wished for love and protection, not money. It was a slight contrast between two women seemingly in the same situation, but because Kim’s wish wasn’t as materialistic, it was her wish that came true, not Gigi’s.

Kim’s purity was obvious. What was also obvious but tend to be ignore was that: she was pure among impure Asian women, she was the perfect victim under brutish and scheming Asian men. She was moral and good, the other Asian people were not. Kim’s story was not a story about her being an Asian woman, her story was about how she was different from the Asian people who did not matter. That was why she was sympathetic. That was why she was “acceptable”. She was what a model minority should be. She was who Chris – the white man, the beacon of Western progress – chose.

Chris was the example of the white savior complex: a prince charming who would rescue the princess. Chris was a White Man who was not aware of his power in being White and being a Man. He was painfully (and by that I mean he caused me pain) so unaware of his role in the narrative, but we can only partially blame him because the creators were probably unaware of the role America and Western colonialism and imperialism played in the Vietnam war.

Chris’ first appearance and interaction with Kim was him “saving” her from another soldier. He was gentle and polite, the true gentleman. He wanted Kim to leave the brothel and was intercepted by the Engineer. Already, Chris was different from both the other soldiers and the Vietnamese Engineer. He was the perfect guy for Kim to meet: “a man who will not kill, who’ll fight for me instead”. While Chris had probably killed before, to Kim he was a hero, a savior from her dreams. This, interestingly, was also what Western colonizers thought of themselves when they invaded other countries – subsequentially bringing destruction and death to many cultures. Chris also directly brought forth Kim’s tragedy, like the system he served.

Chris was also set up to be a tragic character with seemingly no choice in the later part of the story. He tried to bring Kim with him but was not able. He didn’t have a choice when John told him about Kim and her son. While with Kim, her lack of choice was her lack of agency, Chris’ lack of choice was the lack of self-awareness and responsibility of one’s action. Again, this was distinctly a Western, colonialism-apologist perspective and Chris was the manifestation of it. This lack of self-awareness was evident in his song “Why God why”. “When I went home before, no one talked of the war. What they knew from tv didn't have a thing to do with me”: Chris and the Western world viewed the Vietnam war as something fictional, unreal. They removed themselves from the guilt of what colonialism did to an Asian country and are unaware of their own benefits from colonialism. Chris talked about Vietnam the same way Americans talk about Vietnam now, as if it was not a real place, as if the Vietnam war was separate from the US. “I like my memory as they were”, he sang, meaning he liked his memory of a Vietnam devoid of all humanizing traits, of Vietnamese people who weren’t the people he cared about. And he would have been content with that memory if Kim hadn’t appeared.

Chris, as a white man, was put into contrast with the Asian men in Miss Saigon, just as Kim was put into contrast with the Asian women. And like Kim, this contrast provided a vision of the “typical” Vietnamese person (uncivilized, greedy, violent) and the white man (polite, gentle, giving). Instead of using Kim to earn money like the Engineer, he wanted to give her money for a free life. Instead of threaten Kim with violence like Thuy, Chris used violence only to protect Kim. However, Chris had choices. His gender and his race both contributed to the power he had in Vietnam. He might be a “minority” on stage, race-wise, but his position was still on top of the societal ladder. Chris had choices: of which girl to fall in love with, of which girl to protect. He chose Kim because of her purity. Kim, again, became the example of the model minority – someone who was different from the people around her, who was submissive toward and strived for the approval of a white man. She was different from the other Asian people – men and women – around her, and therefore she was someone – the only one – who deserved to be seen as “human” by Chris.

Miss Saigon was at best, a colonialism apologist narrative and at worst a pro-colonialism narrative. It romanticized the Vietnam war, glossed over the violence and damage Western imperialism the US inflicted upon Vietnam, and reeked of hypocritical white guilt and performative sympathy. The story was incredibly insidious not only because it showed racist and misogynistic stereotypes of Vietnamese people and Asian people in general, but also proposed and reinforced a social hierarchy of acceptability and model minority between Asian people under the eyes of the white Western world.